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My son Marty and I spent the day in the hospital.
It wasn’t unfamiliar.
You know how people say of some folk, why, he was never sick a day in his life? Well, of my 23-year-old son, Martin, you might say, “Kid was never well a day in his life.”
The surgery he has Thursday on his broken hand will be the third in a short life — all of them harrowing. He was on his way to rehearsal, for his first Equity show, ‘Oliver!’ in Boston, when he was T-boned by a guy trying to make a left turn from the center lane on a one-way street, the presence of Marty’s car in the left land notwithstanding.
In most of the rest of the country, excluding perhaps southern Florida, this is known as “mayhem.” In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, it is known as “driving.” You start your engine and you take your chances.
For Marty, this is, sadly, business as usual. Nothing is simple for him. Because his brothers had flu, when he was twelve, I told him to drink 7-Up and lie down. When he collapsed onstage, we found out he had a ruptured appendix. There was a slight chance an abscess would form, requiring future surgery.
Three of those.
Because he had sleep apnea, he had his tonsils removed and uvula clipped when he was sixteen. There was a slight chance he would have hemorrhage.
Marty woke me up at 3 a.m., carrying a mixing bowl of blood.
He said the most painful part was cauterizing his throat.
I find all this so gross and sickening. But, Marty didn’t lick it off the ground. When I recently got a new physician, she looked at my recent medical history (which included breaking one of my teeth off below the gum, with catlike grace) and a little surgical test last spring that ended up with pulling out some of my parts and my spending a month with my little sister and her husband and their boys in their thousand-square-foot farm house. The doctor said, “Are you, trying to kill yourself or something? Slowly?”
Marty … will heal.
I am still sort of healing (differential of just over 30 years in immuno-joy).
Still, by his age, I’d only broken one hand and had a concussion as well as a welter of bee stings.
What lies ahead for this hapless kid?
And he’s an actor.
While his face is his fortune, so is the rest of him. And they’re chipping away at him … while I could be a brain in an aquarium and still do my job.

Mine — when people fold paper and then run their fingers along it? It gives me chills of horror just to think about it.

Syrup. When I was about four, I chased my mom into the corner grocery store, and ran smack into this pyramid display of about 40 glass bottles of maple syrup. (Who makes a PYRAMID of maple syrup bottles?) There was a storm of glass and a spreading lake of syrup and blood … never ate maple syrup again.
REALLY big birds. They’re just too prehistoric.

Malls. This is self-explanatory.

But the big one, the only one that is real is … being lost, on foot or in the car. Being lost, rural or urban, night or day, makes me feel as though I’m at the edge of the apocalypse.

Now for others …

Paper cuts

Eating meat that’s identifiable as the animal it was when it was alive

Back in 1990, when I was a young mother and got a perm (a great, fat, pyramidical perm), I knew even then that this would be an occasion for photo-album shame. Little did I know that, during my perm period, things would happen, such as the whoopsie doodle publication of my first novel, THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN, that meant I would be recorded with that fuzzy pyramid on my head. Right now, I know that little tattoos, in celebration of turning 30 or 40 or 50, are not going to last — while the kind of tattoos that are a lifelong symbol of a raw and unexpected dawn after a twenty-hour night in some castaway place, will last forever. Vertical platform heels, that make even the agile walk like a wooden toy soldier, will not last, but ballet flats will. Tans won’t be back. Bubble mini skirts are headed down the wind tunnel of memory. And Axe for men will be replaced by something that doesn’t make clean smell like dirty papered over, the sooner the better. Do you know which current style is headed out forever?

Speaking of thinking person’s thriller, I can’t think of a better way to describe Jacquelyn Mitchard’s groundbreaking, pitch-perfect What We Saw at Night (Soho Press, $17.99, 243 pages). Best known for penning the first ever book selected by Oprah (The Deep End of the Ocean) Mitchard this time out serves up teenage protagonists who all suffer from a rare illness that makes them deathly allergic to sunlight and thus confined to a vampire-like existence roaming the streets at night. Daredevils occupying their own private dystopian world in stark contrast to the hours ruled by the “Daytimers.” This is a rare tale that’s as riveting as it is heart wrenching penned by a true master of the written word.

Best friends for life, Allie, Juliet, and Rob rule the night country — liberating boats for midnight swims, dipping in the hot tubs of fancy ski chalets, looking for any risk or thrill or secret the night can offer. They’re out there because they can never see the sun. A genetic defect, XP, means that life is the toaster, and they are the bread. Their lives may be short. They don’t want to die without ever having really lived. When they take up the fierce, demanding urban sport of Parkour, leaping from buildings, vaulting over walls, they are, for the first time, more powerful and free than “the daytimers.” But one night, the night of their greatest feat, bouldering up a five-story cliffside building, they glimpse, through a glass door, the unspeakable: a man with what appears the dead body of a young woman. In their terror, they don’t realize … he sees them too. That night breaks open a world of old secrets and new lies, and terror even greater than the fear of death.

Her love is the legal thriller: she’s so crazy about Scott Turow’s work that she thought she could be the next Scott Turow (Hey, sorry Scott, if you get good enough, there’s always going to be a next you, even if there’s a current you). She knew all the right elements – the good guy with a shadow past, the sympathetic but somehow sinister victim. When she put them all together, they should have worked like a fine watch to create a readable narrative, but they didn’t because it takes more than all the elements to make a story, just as it takes more than all the ingredients to make a cake. What she wrote wasn’t even really a novel: it was an organized notebook.

A handful of publishers, big and small, weren’t really interested, although several letters praised her voice.

So she published it herself, through one of the crop of straight-to-digital publishers, among them Amazon’s Kindle Direct, and others that offer the services of an editor and package, as well as marketing advice and direction. Amazon has an obvious edge, but of the sixteen self-published direct-to-e authors I know, ten swear by other favorites.

Several other friends have self-published in “trade” (large form) paperback, some accepted by publishers with no up-front tariff who do the design, some editing, and lend a hand with a marketing plan. The author can earn up to 70% profit on every book sold by POD, or “print on demand.”

“I’d much rather do this than get an advance I might not be able to earn. There’s so much less pressure,” says the next Scott Turow.

Because she is a beloved, charming, credible person (and because those suspenseful elements promised so much) five thousand people bought her first book. Her second followed quickly. “It works!” she said. “I have total editorial control. I know what I’m doing. No one is changing one word that I write.”

That’s the sad fact. No one is changing one word that she writes.

Authors say traditionally that when you want to administer self-abuse, you read your reviews on Amazon. Sometimes, the reader reviews will say that your latest book is a masterwork (this is usually your best friend). Some will say that your work compares favorably to (insert most dreaded author name here). One of the ways that readers show that they are forces to be reckoned with is to say that this book could have “used a good edit.”

What those readers mean is that the book should have been shorter.

Often that book has had a good edit, or three or five.

Sometimes the edit adds pages. Most people don’t know that. Sometimes, the edit forces the author to explain the obvious in more ways than anyone could believe.

Most often though, the editor has saved the author from wearing a great suit with a big blot of mustard on the lapel. A great editor has a price beyond rubies. That editor may not know what it’s like to write, but sure knows how to read, and has extraordinary taste. Editors’ futures and reputations ride on the success of
their authors.

Would I have a book published over which I had complete editorial control? The very thought is like two hands grabbing my stomach and twisting. It’s that horrifying.

A friend of mine at a university in the Midwest has accepted two students into the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program she directs. Both had enormous potential and that indefinable something – talent? Ease within language? One young woman had seven self- published books to her credit; the other had five. Those books
had cool titles and clever conceits and their covers showed a savvy sense of branding, in that they were different from each other, but colors, titles, designs and type-faces all worked to identify them as a certain kind of confection, from a certain company. They were smart books but they were not good books.

My friend has written two books and is finishing a third.

Her books were published in the traditional way. If your student has written seven, there’s a certain skewed presumption – even if your books were critically acclaimed or
made “the list.”

The presumption is that the student knows best.

The presumption is scary.

There are more books than ever out there, most published the usual way. Even some that get extraordinary attention are dumb. I would venture to guess that even more
self-published books are dumb because I think second eyes are essential.

What kind of gatekeeper can let this new enterprise flourish without making the bar so low you don’t even notice it?

What difference does it make? I’m afraid that there’s a drawn big boomerang: After buying a few, or even a slew, of self-indulgent, self-published books, readers are going
to get fed up. But they’re going to get fed up with everyone who writes books, except Scott Turow and Jodi Picoult

Chris Meloni is an actor best known for playing Elliott
Stabler, a detective, on the ‘Law and Order’ spinoff series, NBC’s ‘Special
Victims Unit.’

He
left at the beginning of this, the show’s 13th season, when contract
talks broke down.

I
have no idea what Chris Meloni was making for playing the part of someone who
was misnamed but brilliantly cast (I don’t get this, Dick Wolf. If a guy looks
obviously Italian, and acts Italian, and is Italian, why do you search out a
name like … Stabler? Why not have the psychiatrist (played by B.D. Wong) called
Jason Finley or Brian Hewitt instead of George Huang? Could you call me, Dick,
before you go naming characters again?). Anyhow. I’m trying to get over the
fact that Chris Meloni left, because, although I made my twelve-year-old cover
her eyes in the gross bits, watching “Elliott and Olivia” kept thoughts of
remorse, ennui and self-destruction at bay during many a bloody, bloody Sunday
over the past couple of years.

I
hate that Elliott left.

But
Olivia (decently-named and beautifully played by Mariska Hargitay) is staying.

The
other day in an airport, after the flight to Philadelphia left, I did what I
customarily do, walk around the waiting area and pick up the celebrity
magazines, newspapers and sometimes hardcover books (although not leftover
muffins). Paging through a magazine, I learned that OLIVIA may soon be replaced
by JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT (once the perpetual fiancée on ‘Party of Five’ and
lately the perpetually bemused ‘Ghost Whisperer.’)

One of the show runners said that
they’d been “circling” her for a long time.

HUH?

PLEASE?

Consider
this: Mariska Hargitay – beautiful, tough, a seasoned, award-winning actor with
wonderful pitch and Jennifer Love Hewitt, a very pretty young woman who is, I’m
sure, very nice and beloved of her family.

Isn’t
enough truly enough?

For
years, I’ve written, openly and closed-ly, to Dick Wolf, reasoning that I could
play a judge (another author does) or a reporter (I am one) or at least a corpse
(someday I’ll be one) on any iteration of ‘Law and Order.’

Even if Dick Wolf doesn’t give in
to my pleadings and righteous good sense on the former, he must hear me now:
There is no way that Jennifer Love Hewitt (who would probably be called
Detective Consuelo Feinstein) should replace Olivia. Maybe I’m just getting
old. But it’s harder to let things go. And this show is hemorrhaging.

If
history is any teacher, Chris Meloni will be like every series actor who left
in a blaze of anger management issues (and I am making the notable exception of
George Clooney) to turn up decades later in another series looking like the
Picture of David Caruso.

It’s
only TV. But it’s such a consolation.

As
Carly Simon once so poignantly wrote, I
know nothing stays the same/But if you’re willing to play the game/It’s coming
around again. Just a couple more years of ‘S.V.U,’ as it’s currently
construed – with Ice T., with Dann Florek and Richard Belzer.

On
the night before we moved out of the home we had loved for ten years where six of our nine children came home, where,
thirteen years ago, we took our marriage vows, there was no time for nostalgia.

There
was only time for wrapping.

My
best friend and I, and – under duress – my eldest daughter, wrapped presents
for nine children, two brothers and their families and various far-off friends.
At the time I located the various iterations of Legos, crockery, scarves and
Scheherazzade costumes, I had no idea who they were actually for. With few
exceptions, my approach to holiday shopping is like that of a practiced fly
fisherman. I cast out and see what I hook, and if it looks good, I know that
I’m not the only one who’ll prize it. And so, the day was a trial of diplomacy
as well as efficiency.

“When
was the last time she gave you anything good?” Pam asked, referring to a pal.

“I
suspect her of re-gifting,” I admitted.

“I’m
thinking soap,” Pam said. “Goat’s milk, soap, but soap.”

My
eldest girl, nearly 16, put in, “Why does Santa hate William?”

Will
is her eight-year-old brother, whose haul (it always happens to someone) was
clearly on the scant side.

People complain that the array of gifts under the
tree resembles a department store display or the set of a daytime soap opera.
Francie has no problem mixing red and green, or wrapping paper and paper bag.
Our work product rapidly grew in authenticity and shabby chic, as if Francie
were the shaman for a group of blind craft workers. She was finally
apprehended, using a staple gun and a shawl to wrap our nephew’s Spidey
backpack.

Then, we were all finished, and Christmas stowed in
packing boxes, to be celebrated as best we could, far from the ones we love.

Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane were not famous
otherwise. But they wrote, in words rarely sung in the original version:

Interview with Author Jacquelyn Mitchard

By Jennifer Haupt

Created Aug 26 2011 – 10:32am

Second Nature, the latest from Jackie Mitchard,
tells the story of a woman whose face is horribly disfigured and how
her life and relationships change when her face is restored, more than a
decade after the accident. Here’s more from the author of Deep End of the Ocean:

Jennifer Haupt: How did you come up with the premise for this story?

Jackie Mitchard:
The seed for this story was planted fifty years ago, when I was so
young I’m not sure how much of the events themselves I actually remember
and how much is invented memory.
On the west side of Chicago, near where grew up, there was a fire at a
school called Our Lady of Angels. One memory that I know is genuine is
of seeing of my mother answering the telephone and then crying so hard
that she slid down the wall and sat on the floor, the phone receiver
just lying
there. I remember even the height of the kitchen table next to my head.
No one on the west side was untouched by what we called simply “OLA.” I
grew up with kids whose siblings and cousins died in that fire, which
killed ninety-two children and three teaching nuns. It was, and remains,
the second worst school fire in history.

You don’t ever
really recover from such a huge transformational event, even if you
survive it. Of course, I never forgot it, and remember playing with
friends whose mothers had a little shrine in the house with a photo of
the child who died and candles and a status of the sacred heart. For
years, I’ve wondered about the personal dimension of something like
that, about the wounds that show and the wounds that don’t – which can
be much more serious. This is how I began to think of Sicily Coyne, and
how being disfigured on the outside is different from being denatured on
the inside.

JH: Why did you pull Beth Cappadora, your beloved character from Deep End of the Ocean, into this novel?

JM: Beth
grew up in the town where the Holy Angels fire happened, and her
father was a firefighter there. The bonds of memory and proximity are
strong. It was natural to intertwine those characters’ lives, and to see
what happened. But what happened was more than I ever expected would
happen.

JH: How much research did you do concerning women who have been facially disfigured?

JM: This
book was so research intensive that I nearly snapped my cap. I
ordinarily do a great deal of research for books, rather than writing
simply from my own experience. I write not just about what I know but
what I want or need to know. So I talked with people who are facially
disfigured and also with those who help them, including burn surgeons
and anaplastologists who make prosthetic noses and ears, whose vital art
form is going to be out-moded by soft-tissue transplants that can give
people real noses that actually work and have nerves and sensory
capability.

People who were maimed fell into two categories: There
were those who went veiled, emotionally and physically, who withdrew
from the world in agony and shame, with this behavior based in part of the level of their disability and in part on their personality
before. The other group was like Sicily, who was almost, if you will,
in your face about her disfigurement, daring anyone to treat her
differently, fighting for a career and as much of a social life
as was humanly possible. Those kinds of people often attract so-called
“normal” partners, because their spirit is unique and deeply attractive.
For Sicily, it was when she no longer had her broken face to explain
everything about why she was the way she was that she began to flounder,
and she was smart, knowing instinctively that it was always wise to be careful what you wish for.

JH: How is this novel a departure from your previous works? What was your biggest challenge in developing this story?

JM:
This is a science fiction novel. It is fiction and it is about real
science. It’s not about aliens or a rogue virus, but it is about a
future world. My early education
was in science and I love it; most of my reading is in science, natural
history, paleoanthropology and botany. However, I was breaking off a
big chunk here, however, in part because there are no generalizations
about face transplants yet, because of there having been no more than
twenty cases. So I had to consult with doctors and potential candidates
for face transplant procedures based on speculation; but it was educated
speculation because these procedures are too important, for example, to
burn victims, that they won’t become more common and aesthetically
spectacular.

JH: Why aren’t these procedures more common?

JM: I
think it’s because of the emotional connotations for the families of
donors. In just the same way as people can talk on TV about sexual abuse
and selling drugs
but draw the line at money, people give birth on TV but draw the line
at faces (except in cosmetic surgery shows). The face is probably the
most psychological private part of the body, even though, ironically,
it’s the one people see most. The face has mythic connotations, as the
mask of the soul, with eyes the mirror or porthole to the spirit.

So,
why are there so few face transplants? There are so few donors, I
think. First, someone who donates a face for transplant has to be either
healthy but brain
dead or dying of a disease that has nothing to do with the health and
strength of their soft tissue … and who has a family who can come to
terms with burying the beloved spouse or child or brother without a
face, which is not the same thing emotionally, not at all, as burying
someone without a heart or lungs. When we get past seeing this idea as
“cosmetic,” and realize how vital it is for people disfigured in
accidents to be able to talk and taste and kiss their children, we’ll
see the ultimate humanity of this gracious gift. Part of the reason that
the fictional Sicily, a medical illustrator, asks for this whole
process to be documented photographically is to get past the weird
science and ‘Phantom of the Opera’ aura that surrounds it. For me, the
biggest challenge was wandering in the wilds of immunology, with my
friends who are doctors pulling me back onto the trail.

JH:
How do you find inspiration for your writing? Is there anything you do
that, on the surface, has nothing to do with writing, but it actually
helps your creativity?

JM: Travel
and exercise are the big things. I literally can feel my mind get
sharper and deeper as I see new things and tire my muscles. Reading is
more obvious, but I try to confine my reading, during those times I’m
writing fiction, to non-fiction – to subjects that are around the world
from the research I’m doing or the story I’m telling because it’s there
than I find the nugget of information that gives my own work more
texture.

JH: You teach a lot of workshops. How does teaching other writers nurture your creativity?

JM:
I’m an adjunct professor in the Masters of Fine Arts program in
Creative Writing at Fairfield University and I am a faculty fellow,
earning my own MFA, at Southern New Hampshire University. While it’s
difficult to give my students everything they need with the demands of
my other responsibilities in life. teaching is something I just will
never give up. It really does fill the well, at the same time that it
drains the well. You can’t have ego, and you can’t give halfway. When
I’m at the residencies for the programs with which I’m associated, there
is no time for me. I disappear into the teaching just as I disappear
into writing or being a mother, and I emerge new and raw.

JM:
Apparently, it plays a much, much bigger role than I understand. I
would consider myself to have the life of the spirit of the average salt
shaker. I certainly do not consider myself to be conventionally a
believer, there is a huge portion of almost every story that turns on
the hinge of faith and moral
choices based on deeply held values. Sicily’s aunt is a nun. When she
prays for the recovery of her son, Ben, Beth Cappadora uses the words
of the Latin mass, “Agnes dei …” Where the heck did that come from?
Who knew I even remembered it? I was a kid when that changed.
Apparently, it’s true what an old friend said about me, that I’m a
Puritan who examines her soul every day and finds it wanting.

JH: What’s the one true thing you learned from Sicily?

JM:
I learned the truth of what Saint Teresa said so eloquently, that there
are more tears shed over answered prayers than unanswered prayers.

New York Times bestseller Jacquelyn Mitchard’s novels include The Deep End of the Ocean, Twelve Times Blessed, and The Breakdown Lane. She is also a journalist and author of The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship, a collection of her newspaper columns. She lives with her husband and six children in Madison, Wisconsin.

The
other day at the pool, I heard a man tell his son to hurry. "We have hockey and
then math," he said.

We'd
had summer school, too, for a month. And now a week of swimming lessons. The
rest of the time, the kids ran up and down and screamed. They made Hot Wheels
tracks from cardboard boxes. They made castles from cardboard boxes. They made
rabbit traps from cardboard boxes. They jumped on the trampoline two hours a
day. They swam in the pool four hours a day. When it rained, they played Mario
Brothers.

It started as a social experiment.

No,
that's a lie.

It
started with two desperate mothers of invention.

This
past summer, my neighbor Pam and I had five children under the age of seven,
two twelve-year-olds, and a schedule of travel for work so heavy the bottom was
falling out.

So
we dialed back, and not on those punishing schedules.

If we'd done that, it would have
meant her losing an essential contract and my dropping out of graduate school.
Our responsibility to our kids is to support them in every way, including
economically.

We
dialed back in time, to the Sixties, which I was a young kid and my neighbor
was a concept. There were plenty of mothers at home, then, in the summer, but
there were plenty who were not. Older brothers and sisters were forced to give up being
tormentors and assume the position of guardians, grudgingly yet with a certain
pride. Had we raised lily-livered sissy babies who would be unable to find
re-runs of 'Bugs Bunny' on TV or slap together a PBJ?

We decided not to know this even
was possible.

For
this entire summer, we have crossed our fingers and prayed for good instincts,
leaving the "big girls" in charge of the free-range, peer-raised youngsters.

They've gone on backyard picnics.
They've built entire cities from cardboard boxes. They've made some pizzas that
disgusted even the dogs.

Some mornings the "big girls" went
to summer school.

Then, one of the boomerang boys, a
basement post-grad living the vampire life on the reverse clock as he hunts
down a fulltime job, was coaxed from the shadows to make breakfast and his
presence evident. Those were special days. Kids who mixed their cheerios with
ice cream most mornings ("It's milk!"
Mia argued) dined on strawberry crepes and Hawaiian smoothies.

How
did they do?

We
had some moments when our heart stopped from fear (A phone call: "Will's making
a fire, but it's outside ...") and some when our hearts sang from requited love
(A note: All the kids are mean and selfish
and bullies and rude and I hate them but they are fine.) It turned out that
Will had lit one match. The kids ARE mean and selfish, but fine.

Despite
the truth that we wished to be there more, and we did avert some catastrophes,
the kids woke their imaginations from boredom, planning pretend beach trips and
hatching butterflies in syrup jars, and nobody was abused or neglected or went
hungry. They have memories that we don't have, and an understanding of each
other that, for better or worse, would not exist with us doing the editing. It
was a lesson on both sides.

Although
they didn't grow up, they did grow, in tolerance, boldness, and inches. We
didn't want to leave them to their own devices, but now know we can.